National Book Critics Circle Announces Its Finalists For Publishing Year 2015

Today the NBCC announced its 30 finalists in six categories––autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry–for the outstanding books of 2015. The winners of three additional prizes were announced as well. The National Book Critics Circle Awards, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book-review editors.

The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is Wendell Berry. Now 81 and still productive, Berry is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, 28 volumes of poetry, and 31 volumes of nonfiction. Set in the imaginary town of Port William, Kentucky, his fiction constitutes a cycle about themes of life in rural America. An outspoken environmentalist, organic farmer, and pacifist, Berry has written about and engaged in civil disobedience against industrial agribusiness, ecological destruction, and militarization. He was the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award and a 2010 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His most recent books are “Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder” and “Terrapin and Other Poems” (both from Counterpoint, 2014).

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s story collection “Night at the Fiestas” (W.W. Norton & Company) is the recipient of the third annual John Leonard Prize, established in 2013 to recognize outstanding first books in any genre. Named to honor the memory of founding NBCC member John Leonard, the prize is decided by a direct vote of the organization’s 700 members nationwide.

The recipient of the 2015 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing is Carlos Lozada. Lozada is associate editor and nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post. A native of Lima, Peru, he is a graduate of Notre Dame and Princeton. Before joining the Post in 2005, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The Balakian Citation carries with it a $1,000 cash prize, generously endowed by NBCC board member Gregg Barrios.

Here is the complete list of NBCC Award finalists for the publishing year 2015:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World” (Grand Central Publishing)

Vivian Gornick, “The Odd Woman and the City” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

George Hodgman, “Bettyville” (Viking)

Margo Jefferson, “Negroland” (Pantheon)

Helen Macdonald, “H Is for Hawk” (Grove Press)

BIOGRAPHY

Terry Alford, “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” (Oxford University Press)

Charlotte Gordon, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley” (Random House)

T.J. Stiles, “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America” (Alfred A. Knopf)

Rosemary Sullivan, “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva” (Harper)

Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch, “Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Liveright)

CRITICISM

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (Spiegel & Grau)

Leo Damrosch, “Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake” (Yale University Press)

Maggie Nelson, “The Argonauts” (Graywolf)

Colm Tóibín, “On Elizabeth Bishop” (Princeton University Press)

James Wood, “The Nearest Thing to Life” (Brandeis University Press)

FICTION

Paul Beatty, “The Sellout” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies” (Riverhead)

Valeria Luiselli, “The Story of My Teeth” (Coffee House Press)

Anthony Marra, “The Tsar of Love and Techno” (Hogarth)

Ottessa Moshfegh, “Eileen” (Penguin Press)

NONFICTION

Mary Beard, “SPQR: A History of Rome” (Liveright)

Ari Berman, “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Jill Leovy, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” (Spiegel & Grau)

Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury)

Brian Seibert, “What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

POETRY

Ross Gay, “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Terrance Hayes, “How to Be Drawn” (Penguin)

Ada Limón, “Bright Dead Things” (Milkweed Editions)

Sinéad Morrissey, “Parallax and Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Frank Stanford, “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” (Copper Canyon Press)

THIRTEEN’s Nature Exposes the Sly Tricks of Natural Born Hustlers

When it comes to the most important goals in the animal kingdom, learning how to survive and raising the next generation are right at the top of the list. This may seem clear cut, but the lengths to which some animals go to achieve these objectives can often be downright devious. To illustrate the point, we see a shady squirrel, double-crossing cuttlefish, a conniving orchid mantis and a deceitful bird called a drongo use mimicry, disguise, and trickery to get what they want. Throughout the episodes, scientists studying animal con artists pull back the curtain on their deceptions, using their latest research to demonstrate how each of them hustles their mark.

Picture Shows: Mmamoriri the Bearded Lioness. Scientists believe because Mmamoriri the bearded lioness mimics a male, that other rivals believe there are more lions in the pride, than there actually are. © BBC/Chadden Hunter

This three-part series reveals the modus operandi of some of nature’s greatest animal con artists as they outwit predators, line up their next meal, and get the girl. Natural Born Hustlers airs Wednesday, January 13, 20 & 27, 2016 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). After each broadcast, the episode will be available for online streaming at www.pbs.org/nature.

Picture Shows: Cuttlefish ingeniously transform their entire bodies to match their surroundings, nature’s answer to an invisibility cloak. © Richard Whitcomb/Shutterstock

The first episode, Staying Alive, offers stories about unusual survival techniques. Cuttlefish, for example, elude their many predators with a kind of invisibility cloak. They completely transform themselves to match the colors and patterns of their surroundings. But what is truly remarkable is that they do this despite being color-blind. The secret to how they do it is hidden in their skin, which can sense and possibly even “see” color using a protein usually found only in eyes. And these great illusionists have another trick that no other animal can do. Their skin can also morph from a flat surface to a three dimensional one in order to complete the camouflage. Other ruses revealed include: why burrowing owls, who live underground, mimic the sounds of rattlesnakes; how imitation may not just be the sincerest form of flattery, it can also save your life; and what deception the regal horned lizard employs as a last resort to keep a menacing coachwhip snake at bay.

Picture Shows: Drongo. The Drongo is the ultimate animal hustler, tricking many different animals with confidence tricks to cheat them out of a meal. © BBC/Victoria Buckley

The duplicitous ways in which animals try to secure their next meal is the subject of the second episode, The Hunger Hustle. Singled out is the devious drongo, a South African bird. In winter, he has to rely on grubs and insects that live underground, but other animals are far better equipped to dig them up, so the drongo devises a con. He serves as lookout while vulnerable social weaver birds are on the ground digging up food. If a predator is spotted, he sends out an alarm call and the weavers head for safety until they get an all clear call from him. But the drongo also issues fake alarm calls, allowing him to eat food the weavers have dug up before issuing an all clear to return.

Looking just like a flower, orchid mantises use aggressive mimicry to lure in their prey; in fact, they are even more attractive to insects than flowers themselves. © Sebastian Janicki/Shutterstock

Among other segments: the orchid mantis, which attracts insects by mimicking a flower and why it is even more successful than the real thing; how killer whales use sound to manipulate the behavior of herring to their advantage; and how and why gray squirrels practice sleight of hand to protect the nuts they’ve gathered to get them through the winter.

Nashville’s Frist Center For the Visual Arts Presents “The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography and Film”

Citywide Film Series in Conjunction with Exhibition Features “Battleship Potemkin” on 35 mm, “Man with a Movie Camera,” and More

The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography and Film, will be on view at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts from March 11 through July 4, 2016, and examines the relationship between art and politics and illustrates how photography, film and poster art were used as powerful propaganda tools in the early years of the Soviet Union. Organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, The Power of Pictures will make its second and final U.S. stop in Nashville before traveling to Europe.

The exhibition was organized by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Senior Curator Emerita, and Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, both at The Jewish Museum, New York.

Located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, Tenn., the Frist Center offers the finest visual art from local, regional, national, and international sources in a program of changing exhibitions that inspire people through art to look at their world in new ways.

“In keeping with the First Center’s goal of encouraging our audience to view the world in new ways through art, this exhibition may inspire visitors to assess the images that we are constantly inundated by today with a more critical and informed eye,” says Frist Center Curator Katie Delmez who is overseeing the Frist Center’s presentation. “The interplay of political messaging and art continues in the ever-evolving media outlets of the twenty-first century.“

Arkady Shaikhet. Express, 1939. Gelatin silver print. Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York. Artwork © Estate of Arkady Shaikhet, courtesy of Nailya Alexander Gallery

From the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution through the 1930s early modernist artists acted as engines of social change and radical political engagement. Through approximately 150 objects, including photographs, 12 feature-length films, periodicals and cameras, The Power of Pictures documents not only how lens-based art was used to disseminate Communist ideology, but also how the compelling, message-laced work from this period energized and expanded the potential of photography and film.

The Power of Pictures highlights major constructivist photographers Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Boris Ignatovich, whose work was presented in landmark exhibitions of the time. Such photographers influenced a new generation of photojournalists, including Arkady Shaikhet, Max Penson, Eleazar Langman and Georgy Zelma. The exhibition also includes films by major directors of the era, such as Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein and Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov.

Georgy Petrusov. New Building from Above, 1930. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Alex Lachmann. Artwork © Georgy Petrusov, courtesy of Alex Lachmann Collection

In a country where 70% of the population was illiterate, heavily illustrated periodicals and film were considered more effective tools than the written word for the propaganda needs of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Recognizing the power of images, Vladimir Lenin himself declared that the camera, as much as the gun, was an important weapon in class struggle and put the arts at the service of the Revolution.

Although the Communist government initially encouraged the unconventional techniques of the avant-garde, such as dramatic camera angles and darkroom manipulation, the period of innovation was brief. By 1932, as Joseph Stalin consolidated power, independent styles were no longer tolerated. Artistic organizations were dissolved and replaced by state-run unions. Art was subject to strict state control, and required to promote an approved, idealized socialist agenda.

Yakov Khalip. On Guard, 1938. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, The Manfred Heiting Collection. Artwork used with permission by Nicolay Khalip. Image provided by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Organized thematically with sections such as “New Perspectives,” “Constructing Socialism,” and “Staging Happiness,” the exhibition demonstrates how alongside avant-garde art, early Soviet photography and film encompassed a much wider range of artistic styles and thematic content than previously recognized. In addition, The Power of Pictures will feature a rich array of vintage film posters, magazines and books. Their striking graphic style, extreme color and dynamic geometric designs, combined with an innovative use of collage and photomontage, convey a sensibility that is fresh and appealing nearly a century later.